one more miracle

Firstly: Happy birthday glamorous_nymph! I hope it is a lovely one. ♥

Secondly: LOOK I HAVE A JACOB PITTS ICON. He's so pretty siiiiigh. I maaade it! And I feel I should share the original picture with you, because HOLY PIERCING EYES BATMAN. *___* ( Click at your own risk! )

Speaking of Jacob Pitts, I rewatched some of Justified episode 2 today (and right after I tweeted about it, Brian Schechter tweeted only the words "Justified episode 2" - it was creepy) and man, I forgot that Tim (JACOB PITTS) has some really great scenes there! I love the conversation he has with Raylan about watching targets when he was a sniper in Afghanistan. I want more character development like that, and more one-on-one hotass dudes time! C'mon show! Overall, though, I'm REALLY loving Justified. A lot. You should watch it!

So I had a whole bunch of things planned to post about, and then I randomly clicked on a tab in which I've been going back and reading all my Dublin LJ entries. I found one where I talked about Niall, near the end of my time there, and god, it's SO OBVIOUS that I was completely ass-over-teakettle for him, and he was for ME, and we did nothing about it until my last week there. Why do we fail so hard? I don't say this lightly, but - I love him. I do. We've been an ocean apart for two years, yet I feel closer to him than most other people in the universe. We've maintained a beautiful friendship through emails and talking all the time, and he's just - so important to me. I love him. I do. I think I might do something about it this time I'm back in Dublin, because even though we can't really be together, I want him to know how I feel. *decisive nod*

Okay, current things! On Thursday, I was starting a new big experiment I've never done before. And it was my second to last day in the lab. It was a day of total fail - the fire alarm went off twice for no reason, a machine I was using cut out, etc. Long story short, I was in lab until past 11 PM, and ate Cheez-Its for dinner. Awesome. So needless to say, I was exhausted, and the next morning my alarm made nary a dent in my rock-like slumber. I woke up at 2 pm, woozy and confused, and went OH SHIT. I emailed my boss and rushed in. She told me she hadn't laughed like that in a while! Haha. Anyway, it was a great motivator to have such limited time (I had a dinner party to be at at 7:30!) and I got a shitload of science done in a very short time. I got one very exciting result! As in, the first result that made me go "oh wow!" all semester. Better late than never right? :P So that was my last day of experiments. On Monday, I'll give my research presentation, then I'll be done! *hands*

Apparently, I "matched" with four guys from speed dating - three engineers and a computer scientist. Hilarious. All three engineers have emailed me, which is sweet, but I honestly don't really remember which they were, except for one of them, and he's pretty zany. Which can be a good thing, but I don't know. I'm dithering. Anyway, my roomies poked and prodded at me until I just said yes to the one who set a concrete time and place, so we're going for brunch tomorrow! *hands* We'll see. I highly doubt this will turn into anything (these guys, like, embody my problems with Dave multiplied by a billionty, and rather made me miss him, honestly) but it could be, if nothing else, a nice brunch and conversation. Plus, it's at Zingerman's, which is kind of what Ann Arbor's famous for - it's a whole block away from my house and I've NEVER BEEN. So he wins at setting up a date, haha. He might actually be the one who liked Supernatural - I can't remember! That would be fun.

On Friday, Emily and I went to Noah's for dinner with a bunch of his friends, which was fun, and then we all went out. We went to a bar called the Jolly Pumpkin where they distill their own liquors, and I had I had this AMAZING cocktail called a Cran Strawberry which was their in-house cranberry vodka and muddled strawberries and OMNOMNOMNOM. Amazing. And a huge plus, the waiter was SO CUTE I COULD HAVE DIED. He had short curly hair and this really deep, sexy voice and unfffff. I left my number on the receipt because he was so hot I just couldn't NOT, but obviously nothing came of it. No way a guy that looks like that is single, and no way he finds me attractive anyway. :P

Hmm, boy-crazy, ME? And to think I let a perfectly nice one go. /o\ Gah, I don't know. I still wonder if that was right. But then I think about how much more intensely I feel about Niall than I did about Dave, and I probably did. Just that one happens to live in my town and the other is across the ocean. :-/

Lalala, rambling entry is rambling. I'll just put it out of its misery. I really should go to bed, so I can be up and at em for my brunch date. Do you realize that this is kind of my first actual date with a guy that I don't already know quite well, or that I'm not already seeing? Yeah. Guess it's time!

I'm a little >:( facey at the world right now. Not for any real reason, just minor school stress. We have an exam on Thursday, which I haven't studied....um, at all for, and it's probably going to be really hard, and fml. Then I also am supposed to have something written for my group project by Thursday, buuuut idk if that's going to happen, given the aforementioned test. I should have done both things this Sunday, but I was like OMG A DAY OF REST THANK GOD and just watched True Blood and Life Unexpected. /o\

Speaking of True Blood, THAT HORRIBLY TRAGIC THING THAT YOU WERE ALL TRYING TO AVOID MENTIONING JUST HAPPENED and I am all ;___; and >:((( because HBO WHY YOU GOTTA PLAY ME LIKE THAT?

I just had a fun discussion about tattoos with my two Adorable Co-workers (one is a fellow grad student (I shall call him G), and really quite hot, and also funny and friendly and ugh stop being so cute! the other is the Cute Undergrad whose cheeks I always want to pinch - I shall call him M). G showed me and M the outline of his new tattoo that he just got all over his calf - it's a really cool design with all these things from ~SCIENCE~ all intertwined, like the DNA double helix, chromosomes, nucleosomes (the organizational substructure of DNA), all this really neat stuff in a very cool artsy way. It's completely nerdy and COMPLETELY AWESOME. M adorably asked me and G what the pain is like with a tattoo. I showed him mine ('think happy thoughts' on my ankle), which turned out to be a bad idea because ugh my skin is so dry and I haven't shaved in forever. /o\ But he was sweet about it.

It's nice having two cute boys around, you know? :D Yesterday, the first thing M asked me was "Did you see the Pacific?!" This is the boy who borrowed my Bill and Babe book and told me that he really likes Doc Roe's accent. SIGH TINY CHILD WHY SO TINY. :P He hasn't seen TP yet (can we call it that? typing out The Pacific every time is tiresome, but I don't want to call it toilet paper /o\) but he's real excited to, bless him.

Now I need to study. I woke up today feeling about as animated as a sack of rocks - combination of bed too late and somehow waking up in the wrong part of my cycle, PLUS daylight savings time. Means that it's going to be real hard to get work done today, which suuuucks. /o\ FML, seriously. Meh, I bring it on myself.

Happy Tuesday, ladies and gents. ♥

The vets of this journal will remember Jeremy, my (young, gorgeous) film prof from college whom I became actually really close friends with and who made senior year bearable. I talked about him far too much, and I do apologize about that, but he really was the glue keeping me together that year.

Anywho, I emailed him letting him know that I'll be back in town, and asking if he wanted to get together and catch up. He just replied and INVITED ME TO HIS HOUSE FOR DINNER! ♥____________♥ I am seriously so full of giddy glee! I get to meet his two month old baby boy! And his wife, whom I haven't met yet! And hang out and chat and just be with him again! He's just... one of those people who makes me feel infinitely comfortable and happy - you know? Those people don't come along very often. I'm really, really, really excited about this. Yay. :D

You know all those things that went shitty yesterday? Magically they all fixed themselves today. I RECEIVED MY BAND OF BROTHERS DVDs!!!! :D The lovely UPS delivery guy who I always say hi to brought them to me at work, and I could have kissed him! :D Then the experiment that took all day Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday until 9 PM worked GREAT and my boss is really happy! \\\o/// And THEN, one of my project group members actually said something that really helped me straighten out my thinking and stop panicking, and today I got a lot of productive research done and wrote up a respectable outline for our paper!

This yo yo is up for a moment. I'm predicting I'll actually manage to stay up for a while - tomorrow hang times with my Ann Arbor besties, then driving HOME and seeing daddy and mommy and lil sis, then high school teachers <333, then JEREMY OMGGG, then Rob and MICHELLLLLE and and!! It's going to be glorious.

Thanks for putting up with my shit, y'all. ♥

I haven't been posting pretty much at all, and it's really unfortunate. Kind of a bad side effect of Twitter - I already feel like i've talked about myself enough every day, I don't really feel the pressing need to make a blog post. But I know LJ is so much more lasting and coherent than Twitter updates, so I'm going to force myself to make a long one now. Feel free to skip as much as you like - I just need to have this on the record, so to speak. Now with handy headers for skimming!

The Midwest Stress Response and Molecular Chaperone Meeting
I went to that conference in Chicago with Jason's lab, and it was great! It was a topic-specific meeting, for our very small field, so I understood everything quite well (much better than at a typical mixed-topic conference) and learned a lot about the state of the field and how people approach the questions in it. I got to talk to the woman whose work is the inspiration for my own - she's an experienced professor who was quite intimidating, but I'm glad at least that she now knows who I am and is at least marginally aware of what I want to do. Even better, I talked to her postdoc who did some work that's really interesting to me, and I asked him how he accomplished a particular experiment, and he was like "Oh I'll just send you what we used!" which is actually a pretty hefty collection of really useful tools (overexpression plasmids, for the scientists in the crowd) that will really help give my project a kick in the pants. When/if I join the lab! The weekend gave me great hope that I will in fact join - just the fact that Jason brought me along, and a long conversation we had about the possible directions for my project. I also had a great time hanging out with the people in the lab, and all in all it just reinforced my certainty that this is the place for me, and that Jason thinks so too. So yay. :D (Update: I just forwarded an email conversation I had with that postdoc to Jason, and Jason replied almost immediately with "Thanks Anne - this is exactly what we need." :D I'm so proud of myself! I started a collaboration all on my own! \o/)

Second semester classes
Classes have been going fine. Remember that new academic experiment I told you about, where every class is 10 students giving presentations but no actual lectures? Well, it's actually working out much better than I expected. It still sucks having to put together two presentations a week, but it's getting easier with practice, and the two talks I've given have gone really well. And the other people's talks have been much better than I expected! I've learned about a wide range of topics and all in all it's been quite cool. Props to Dr. Sherman for totally pulling it off, in complete contrast to Dr. Fuckhead from last semester. :P My other class is low key and simple, though our big project, to pitch a new "product" to accomplish some biotech goal, is a little intimidating. I tentatively like the people in my group, though I'm holding out judgment on that.

Second lab rotation (anti-cancer)
Lab is fine. I've only just gotten started doing my own experiments. My first one went quite well, reproducing nicely the results of our very experienced tech, so that's encouraging. I did another, very big, experiment for three days, but I still need two MORE days before I actually get the result, and there's no way of knowing right now if it went well. I'm nervous, but I think I did everything right and it should come out at least reasonably well! *crosses fingers* Working with my new boss, Zaneta, is very different than Jason. She's very smart and I think I'll learn a lot from her, but she's also rather more hands-on. Which is fine, it will just take some adjusting. As for cancer research, I'm less excited about it than what I was doing before, because it's so... I don't know, dismal? "Successes" in the cancer field are analogous to dismal failures in other diseases. It's just very difficult for me. I know it needs to be done, and something is better than nothing, but I know it's not for me. Which is fine, since I definitely can't join this lab, so in the meantime I'll just learn and absorb techniques and do the best job I can.

Auto Show!
In NOT science-related things (seriously - I guess this is the life of a grad student!) I went to the Detroit International Auto Show yesterday with my uncle and three little girl cousins! It was AWESOME!! You may know that I LOVE CARS. Like, A LOT. So to roll around in them for four hours was beyond heaven. :DDD And while the Maserati and Lexus concept car and the Audis and the Maybach and the Teslas were gorgeous and sexy as fuck, I'm at heart a modest-yet-badass kind of car lover, so the highlight for me was sitting behind the wheels of a Camaro (unf, you guys, UNFFFFFF), a Mustang, a Challenger, and a Charger. The latter two have rather cheap interiors, but I wanted so badly to put the pedal to that metal. :D My other very favorite (and the display I lingered around the most, sighing wistfully) was the Mazdas. I have mentioned that I have a very serious desire to purchase a Mazda 3 or a Mazda 2, and after sitting in the former and gazing upon the latter, I have an even more serious desire! They're so pretty and small and sporty and fun. The hatchback model means I'd still have some cargo space, and by all accounts they have fun, zippy handling that would be a sheer delight. Let's have some pictures! ( Sassy little lime green cars behind the cut! )

Sorry, sorry, I'll stop drooling now. In conclusion: CARS!!!! :DDD I had a great time with my uncle and cousins, and afterwards I went to their place for a delicious homemade meal of grilled whitefish and swordfish, om nom nom. It was a lovely day, if entirely exhausting!

Afterwards, I drove straight to Francisco's house here in Ann Arbor to hang out with him and Steffen, Kate, and Jenna. We watched CENTERSTAGE and MONSTERS, INC. Why yes, I love my friends, thanks for asking. :DDD Eion Bailey in Centerstage was beyond adorable, omfg. How is he so beautiful??? :D

Lol dolphin trainers

The night before the auto show, my roomies said they were going out for "a drink" so I said why the hell not. We went to a bar, actually sat AT the bar for once, and promptly met two cute grad students who were completely ridic. I was already quite tipsy from beer at dinner, proceeded quickly to drunk with a margarita, and landed squarely on smashed after the guys bought us tequila shots. Oops. :) The guys managed to convince drunk!me that one of them was a dolphin trainer here at Michigan, which, lol - cause there are TOTALLY dolphins in Michigan. I bet they're still proud of pulling that one over on a poor guillible drunk girl. :P I got waaay too cozy with the other dude, but not illicitly, just super-affectionate like I can be. After a couple hours, they walked us home and we said adios - doubt we'll ever see them again, but boy was that FUN. I had forgotten how much fun it can be to just go out, meet random people, and have a good time. In fact, I've been more social in the last three days than I have in three months, which brings me to my final point:

Dave

Dave and I are on a break right now. It's complicated. I've got a mixture of relief, guilt, sadness, and uncertainty, and it's really hard to talk about. So I'm not going to sully this post with that. Maybe some other time.

Last but not least, Teevee

I haven't even seen the new Supernatural yet, but this week's Bones was FANTASTIC. HODGINNNNNS. *squooshes him* If they're going where I think they're going, COUNT ME COMPLETELY IN. BWEE. Also, Castle was lovely and touching and Kaaaaate. Poor darling strong wonderful girl. The tone was definitely more serious than usual (NO ALEXIS *pout*) but it worked reasonably well. Continues to be one of the best shows on TV, with the most heart. ♥